Various mechanisms exist for placing a platform into a lower operational state or sleep mode. Resuming from the sleep mode can be time consuming. The industry is converging on resume speed as a metric that is monitored for licensing or beneficial pricing with regards to preloaded images of Microsoft® Windows®. Recent industry movement is to require a platform to resume to normal operation in less than ¼ second.
A platform often needs to receive direction from the system regarding setup related or platform configuration settings to determine how to operate, including how to resume from a sleep or lower operational state. These configurations are often stored in non-volatile (NV) storage such as CMOS or a flash memory device. Retrieval from these NV storage devices takes a significant amount of time as the access times are slower than system memory.